Putting Mayer’s research to work

Around 2012, Jodi Gersh was travelling to various large Gannett newsrooms and running engagement workshops. She had recently pioneered the first social media position inside Gannett, and now she was helping the company figure out how it could meet its readers on these powerful platforms they were using. She used Joy Mayer’s Community Engagement: A … Continued

Building trust one idea at a time

“One of the things I appreciated most about the Trusting News project is that Joy takes this big hairy topic of “trust in the media” and breaks it down into actionable steps,” says Sarah Binder, the former community engagement manager at the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Binder led the newsroom’s partnership with Trusting News in early 2018. The … Continued

Small-town print goes big-time digital

In the early 2010s, Mark Nienhueser was the sales director for Service Noodle, an online platform that made it easy for small, local service businesses to develop a website and gain a digital footprint. When he moved to the Missouri Press Association, in 2013, he realized there were a lot of untapped digital opportunities for … Continued

Discovering a new news ecosystem

When Michele McLellan dug deep into how local, online journalists were making a living, the result was a three-year series of annual conferences that spawned a national nonprofit organization.

Brian Gorman on MediaExecsTech.com

iPublish Media Solutions is an example of a technology company that makes running a news operation less expensive. They offer a “do-it-yourself” advertising platform that lets individuals or companies build a print, digital or social ad.

Why it works

By 2017, it was clear to Janine York that she had to act. “Our newspaper is our core product, but we knew we needed to expand,” says York, the advertising director at the Missourian, a twice-weekly newspaper in the small town of Washington, Missouri. By 2017, it was clear to Janine York that she had … Continued

A LION is born

Dylan Smith was skeptical when, in 2010, he received an invitation to the first Block by Block conference. Leaving his one-person newsroom for a weekend to fly across the country for a conference aimed at local, independent, online news operators seemed like a waste of time. Smith ran a nonprofit site in a major metro, … Continued

Where media meets tech

Alisa Cromer started her newspaper career, in the early 1980s, in Las Vegas, home of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the flagship paper of the Donrey Media empire, founded by Donald W. Reynolds. “I met old man Reynolds,” Cromer says, and she cut her teeth learning how to compete against him. She ran a small business publication; … Continued